1. Ted Kennedy: A Life by John A. Farrell (Penguin Press)

In his magnificent, engrossing biography of Ted Kennedy, Farrell captures the full arc of the longtime Massachusetts senator’s evolution, from his “silken, Darwinian” childhood to essential patriarch of his family dynasty. Farrell’s book, long-listed for the National Book Award, takes on Kennedy’s “craven” behavior in Chappaquiddick, exposes his drinking and womanizing, and avoids the cliched tropes and metaphors – “Lion of the Senate,” “Teddy Bare.” Farrell switches the aperture, with Kennedy as the lens through which to focus on the liberal cause as it evolved through the Great Society, was shaped by the conservative reaction by Nixon-Reagan-Bush, and was expressed in Kennedy’s crusade for universally accessible health care.

2. Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan by Darryl Pinckney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Rich with sentiment, Pinckney artfully dodges sentimentality in his achingly elegiac memoir of his evolution as a writer and gay Black man, drawn into The New York Review of Books circle through writer Elizabeth Hardwick, who was at its epicenter. In gorgeously impressionistic prose, Pinckney does not recount, but rather evokes the vitality of this rich literary history, through the passion and intellectual energy of writers like Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, and Mary McCarthy; troubled poet Robert Lowell, Hardwick’s ex-husband; and the editors of the New York Review, Robert Silvers and Hardwick’s best friend, Barbara Epstein. But for readers, it is the enduring bond between Pinckney and Hardwick that makes this memoir so special.

3. The New Yorkers: 31 Remarkable People, 400 Years, and the Untold Biography of the World’s Greatest City by Sam Roberts (Bloomsbury)

Roberts, a legendary chronicler of the city, now writing obituaries for the New York Times, digs into the past and illuminates New Yorkers who didn’t make it into the usual narratives of the city yet played a transformative role or personified a moment in its history. Roberts is a congenial expert guide in essays beginning with John Colman (1609, recorded homicide) to Carmelia Goffe who organized her gutsy neighbors on a crusade for affordable home ownership. In between, there is “The Geek Who Invented Gridlock” and the McCrarys, “Tex and Jinx,” who pioneered the celebrity talk show format, opening their radio show with a wink: “Hi, Jinx.”

4. And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Jon Meacham (Random House)

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Meacham focuses on our 16th president’s “moral opposition to human enslavement,” and from this perspective he “charts Lincoln’s struggle to do right as he defined it within the political universe he and his country inhabited.” In his nuanced consideration, Meacham contends that Lincoln was a politician of conscience who established his values by reading sources like the King James Bible and the New England Transcendentalists. “Lincoln’s motives were moral as well as political,” Meacham writes, a reminder that “politics divorced from conscience is fatal to the American experiment in liberty under law.”

5. The Birdcatcher by Gayl Jones (Beacon)

After a long absence from publishing, last year Jones’ novel Palmares was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and now The Birdcatcher is a finalist for the National Book Award. Spare, sinewy, and fierce, Jones’ book wrestles with marriage, identity, and art, and centers on the dynamics between novelist-travel writer Amanda Wordlaw and her best friend, a sculptor working on a mixed media project, and her husband, who invite Amanda to the island of Ibiza. The friend keeps trying to kill her husband, who then puts her into a mental hospital until she is released and begins the cycle once again. In cool observational shards, intimate moments, Jones brilliantly unspools this suspenseful work of fiction.